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Text: Lou or
Editor: Lu or
"It is now in the transition period from functional cars to smart cars, just like TVs and air conditioners are changing from functional appliances to smart appliances, and two-wheeled electric vehicles are also making a similar transformation." In the past, we used two-wheeled electric vehicles as a means of transportation, but in the future we hope that it can connect and interact with people and become part of smart devices. Ren Lingyuan, vice president of Hello Travel, said in an interview with "Business Jianghu".
On December 21, Hello held an electric two-wheeler conference called "New Species Re-Evolution" in Hongqiao, Shanghai, and launched four two-wheeled electric vehicle products, including the intelligent flagship electric vehicle ME70, equipped with automotive-grade OBC fast charging, 72V-44Ah automotive-grade power lithium battery + BMS, and the longest range is 200km.
This is also the second time that the company, which is known for its bicycle-sharing business, has added more weight in this field after Haro announced its entry into the two-wheeled electric vehicle track at the Beijing 798 Art Center in April this year.
Obviously, Hello hopes to replicate the changes that are taking place in the four-wheeled electric vehicle market in the field of two-wheeled electric vehicles - upgrading traditional two-wheeled electric vehicles to smart cars through intelligent systems + hardware, and using the gears of industry transformation to achieve curve overtaking.
"We hope to enter the first camp of the industry in three years and become the industry's first intelligent electric vehicle company in five years," Li Kaijie, executive president of Hello Travel, said at the press conference.
Li Kaichai, CEO of Hello Travel
But this is not an easy task, seeing this opportunity is not only the traditional two-wheeled electric vehicle companies Yadi, Xinri, etc., but also the same technology companies as Haro, Didi, Meituan, so in order to get ahead in this competition, Hello needs to have enough strength and patience.
In the competition of shared bicycles, Hello once counterattacked Mobike and OFO with a first-mover advantage with the playing style of "rural encirclement of the city", and now they are trying to launch a counterattack again in the field of two-wheeled electric vehicles, but this time they no longer rely on "rural encirclement of the city", but choose to break through with hard technology.
Intelligence is at the heart of the competition
As with the last press conference, Haro also highlighted their two-wheeled electric vehicle machine system - VVSmart super-connected car machine system, and released a 2.0 version of the system. The new version of the system adds the keyless operation of the whole vehicle, the fast and insensitive unlocking of the whole vehicle, the self-test tire pressure, the battery, the motor, the controller, the reversing/cart assist system and other functions.
Simply put, similar to the MIUI developed by Xiaomi for mobile phones, X-mart_OS prepared by Xiaopeng for cars, VVsmart is a system launched by Hello for two-wheeled electric vehicles.
Compared with traditional functional two-wheeled electric vehicles, VVsmart has a variety of intelligent attributes.
First of all, the system has data analysis capabilities, which can record the user's daily driving habits and local traffic conditions, so as to analyze the "power output mode" that meets the user's habits to ensure that the motor is in the highest efficiency state at all times. Just like personalized recommendations such as Taobao and Pinduoduo, this is the 'electric vehicle version of a thousand faces'.
Secondly, this system can make two-wheeled electric vehicles have certain perception capabilities and realize the interaction of people and vehicles.
"Users ride an electric vehicle on average 3-4 times a day, and use it more often than white goods. Therefore, we hope to provide more content to users in the interaction, such as users can authorize the car to a friend through the Hello APP without handing over the key, we think that such details will improve efficiency and make travel a more pleasant thing. Ren Lingyuan said.
Ren Lingyuan, vice president of Hello Travel
In addition, Hello also uses intelligent systems to improve the endurance of electric vehicles, Haro Travel EXECUTIVE President Li Kaijie said that with the support of software algorithms, the energy recovery system converts the kinetic energy generated during taxiing and braking into electrical energy and stores it in the battery, which can increase the riding mileage by 8-10 kilometers.
In fact, intelligent systems are one of the rapidly advancing changes in the two-wheeled tram industry in recent years.
According to the "2021 China Two-Wheeled Electric Vehicle Intelligence White Paper" released by iResearch, the user group of two-wheeled electric vehicles shows a younger trend, and more than 70% of users hope to give priority to intelligent anti-theft functions of smart car locks and vehicle tracking; more than 60% of users hope that the priority functions of vehicle APP are vehicle condition detection, including lock status, residual electricity query and other functions.
Therefore, many electric vehicle manufacturers have introduced similar intelligent vehicle systems.
In May 2019, Xinri and Tmall jointly developed the X1, which has speech recognition capabilities, and even recently launched the corresponding AI voice helmet; Yadi, a leading electric vehicle company, also released the Guanzhi 2.0 series in March this year, which also focuses on intelligent voice control systems.
In May 2019, Xinri and Tmall jointly developed the X1 motorcycle
Compared with the above two traditional giants, Halo, which is labeled as a technology company, obviously attaches more importance to the value of intelligent systems, and they not only do intelligent design on the user side, but even provide intelligent services for dealers.
Hello uses POI information (Point of Interest) to help dealers select stores. "Using the hot spot data of Hello shared bicycles and shared mopeds, we help partners to screen out the points with the largest passenger flow, and then combine information such as the cost of opening stores on the street to select the most cost-effective positions for partners." Ren Lingyuan, vice president of Hello Travel, said that they also provide dealers with peripheral user portrait services to more accurately convert online traffic into store transactions.
These technology enablements helped dealers improve sales performance, with a dealer in Yantai selling 400 electric vehicles a month, while another partner in Puyang, Henan Province, sold 2,000 units in eight months.
Of course, with the help of dealers, Hello has also become a dark horse brand in the two-wheeled electric vehicle market.
In 2021, Hello electric vehicles will sell more than 600,000 vehicles and have more than 3,000 stores, which is a good result for Halo, which has only been established for more than a year.
The epidemic, the new national standard and the low penetration rate have pushed up market expectations
In fact, it is not only Hello that has achieved good results in the past period, the entire two-wheeled electric vehicle market has achieved rapid development under the influence of the epidemic - compared with relatively closed and crowded public transportation, two-wheeled electric vehicles that can be ridden outdoors are more likely to bring people a sense of security.
This can be seen in last year's industry data. In 2020, the two-wheeled electric vehicle sales of industry leader Yadi Holdings exceeded 10 million units, an increase of nearly 60% year-on-year; while Xinri Shares sold 3.56 million vehicles in the first three quarters of 2020, up 23.5% year-on-year; another star enterprise, Xiaoniu Electric, sold a total of 160,000 electric scooters in the first two quarters of 2020, with sales increasing by 61.2% year-on-year.
Correspondingly, their shares have also risen rapidly in the past period, with Yadi Holdings' Hong Kong stock price rising from a maximum of 1.5 yuan in early 2020 to about 20 yuan today, while the price of Maverick Electric has also tripled since the beginning of 2020.
Yadi Hong Kong stocks have risen sharply in the past two years
Capital is so optimistic about the two-wheeled electric vehicle industry, but also because under the definition of the new national standard, this industry has once again become a "low penetration market".
On April 15, 2019, the state implemented a revised version of the new national standard GB17761-2018 "Electric Bicycle Safety Technical Specifications" showed that this was referred to as the "new national standard" in the industry.
The new national standard stipulates that electric bicycles must have pedal riding ability, the maximum design speed does not exceed 25km/h, the weight of the vehicle (including batteries) does not exceed 55kg, the motor power does not exceed 400 watts, and the battery voltage does not exceed 48 volts, which makes 40% of existing vehicles (the total number of more than 100 million vehicles) become exceeding the standard, which further increases the market demand for new electric vehicles.
And in order to meet the requirements of the new national standard for weight, batteries and other components, major electric vehicle manufacturers are looking for suitable upgrade alternatives, such as replacing lithium lead iron batteries with lithium batteries - compared with the previous lithium lead iron batteries, lithium batteries have unparalleled advantages in lightweight, long endurance, long life and other aspects.
But until today, the penetration rate of China's lithium battery two-wheel market is not high.
According to the statistics of the white paper released by EVTank, in 2020, the overall penetration rate of China's lithium battery version of electric two-wheelers will reach 23.5%, and its market penetration rate of the entire lithium battery version of electric two-wheelers is expected to be close to 60% by 2025.
Low penetration rate and broad development prospects have prompted a number of technology companies, including Hello, to enter the two-wheeled electric vehicle market. In May this year, Didi's Qingju released two new cars", "Qingfan 3.0" and "Qingque", as well as the future concept model Qingju X, while Meituan opened a two-wheel electric vehicle power exchange project called "Source Power Exchange".
On May 11, Didi Qingju released the concept car "Qingorange X" and the shared two-wheeled products "Qingfan 3.0" and "Qingque"
"We think the penetration rate of this industry is likely to explode exponentially in the next two or three years." Li Kaijie said that this is also one of the reasons why Hello plus yard two-wheel electric vehicle market.
"The state has been encouraging the development of new energy vehicles since 2007, but it has not been until the past two years that their penetration rate has increased, mainly because from the four-wheeled car from hardware to software need to change, and our hardware in front, the speed will be much faster." Lee said.
Establish a standard e-commerce system like JD.com
Of course, to become an electric vehicle manufacturer, Hello must not only have an intelligent system, but also have its own hardware products.
Therefore, Hello has set up a design team and built two intelligent electric vehicle production bases in Wuxi and Tianjin, with an annual planned production capacity of more than 3 million vehicles.
"We invested 200 million yuan in mold development costs and 30 million yuan in design costs, and rented an industrial design center of 1200 square meters, covering the whole process of modeling, model, data, color, and vision." Ren Lingyuan said that Hello plans to achieve basic self-development of smart electric vehicles next year.
In today's two-wheeled electric vehicle market, most of the products are "public model cars" - the first-mover enterprises will sell the mold and design style to the manufacturer after the mold design is completed, so there will be many "similar-looking" but different brands of electric vehicle products on the market.
Hello smart electric vehicle ME70
Obviously, this can not meet the market's demand for individualization, so Hello hopes to fully develop from the configuration and industrial design of the vehicle to the production of sludge and supporting facilities.
But these are not the focus of Hello's transformation of the two-wheeled electric vehicle industry, in fact, Haro's ambition is to set standards - they are trying to establish a new digital production and logistics system in this industry.
"The traditional electric vehicle company is to sell the car to the agent, the agent will pull the car back to the store to sell after the purchase, for the manufacturer such a business path is very short, after the sale, the entire commercial link is over." We have lengthened this commercial chain link, from procurement, production to manufacturing, logistics are all responsible for themselves. We built our own digital system and opened up the whole link, so every car we sold is traceable and traceable. Li Kaibai told "Business Jianghu" that they hope to build a "standard e-commerce logistics like JD.com", which will be the core competitiveness of Hello in the future.
In fact, logistics is a bottleneck in the development of today's two-wheeled electric vehicle industry. In today's e-commerce market, the penetration rate of two-wheeled electric vehicles is much lower than that of white goods products such as refrigerators and air conditioners, and when the penetration rate of the latter has reached 50%, the data of two-wheeled electric vehicles is still only "single digits".
That is to say, in daily consumption, users rarely buy electric vehicles online, and electric vehicle brands are also difficult to sell products online, and the reason behind it is that "logistics is difficult to support." ”
Electric vehicles also use very traditional consignment logistics
"Electric vehicles are not standard, and the transportation cost is very high, so the online penetration rate is low. If we can build a complete logistics system that can transport electric vehicles like refrigerator air conditioners, then we can reduce costs and increase its online penetration. Li Kaichai said that Hello is the only company in the industry that fully grasps logistics information and data.
Now, this logistics system has helped Haro achieve better results online - this year's double 11, Haro ranked second in the sales of electric vehicles on the Tmall platform.
"In our planning path, the platform may become an open platform in the future to help the industry with digital logistics transportation, and it may set new standards for the industry." Lee said.
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Copyright: Commercial Jianghu
Lu or, an ocean crew member with 2 years of maritime experience; 4 years of market experience in oil sales, 8 years of media experience as a business journalist and self-media person.
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